Amir Taaki
| nationality = British | occupation = Programmer | module = }} Amir Taaki ( ; born 6 February 1988) is a British-Iranian anarchist revolutionary, hacktivist, and programmer who is known for his leading role in the bitcoin project, and for pioneering many open source projects. Forbes listed Taaki in their top 30 entrepreneurs of 2014. Driven by the political philosophy of the Rojava revolution, Taaki traveled to Syria, served in the YPG military, and worked in Rojava's civil society on various economic projects for a year and a half. Biography Early years Amir Taaki was born 6 February 1988 in London, the eldest of three children of a Scottish-English mother and an Iranian father who is a property developer. From an early age Taaki took an interest in computer technology, teaching himself computer programming."Speakers 2011," 11th International EPCA Summit, European Payments Consulting Association, www.epcaconference.com/ Retrieved 11 October 2011. Free software After briefly attending three British universities, Taaki gravitated to the free software movement. Taaki assisted in the creation of SDL Collide, an extension of Simple DirectMedia Layer, an open source library used by video game developers. In 2006, Taaki became heavily involved in Crystal Space development under the pseudonym of genjix."Blender & CrystalSpace" in Blender Conference 2006, Youtube. He also developed a number of video games making use of free software, including the adventure game Crystal Core"Pablo Martin Moreno and Amir Taaki," Blender Conference 2006 Proceedings, Blender and the futuristic racer game Ecksdee. Taaki was also a participant in the Blender project Yo Frankie!.Yo Frankie developer list, www.yofrankie.org/ Taaki was a speaker at the 2007 Games Convention in Leipzig. Bitcoin In 2009 and 2010, Taaki made his living as a professional poker player. His experience with online gambling attracted him to the bitcoin project.James Ball, "Bitcoins: how do they work?" The Guardian, 22 June 2011. He founded a UK bitcoin exchange called "Britcoin", which was succeeded in 2011 by a new British exchange called Intersango, in which he was a principal developer,"About Us: Personal Statements," Intersango, britcoin.co.uk which was closed after their UK bank account was restricted following an investigation by Metro Bank."Intersango Status Update" bitcointalk.org. In April 2011, Taaki and Donald Norman established the Bitcoin Consultancy, a group focused on bitcoin project development."Amir Taaki Answers Your Questions About Bitcoin," Slashdot, 22 June 2011. Taaki created the first full reimplementation of the bitcoin protocol named libbitcoin, worked on the bitcoin client Electrum and created other command line utilities around bitcoin and the network. The bitcoin standardisation procedure (Bitcoin Improvement Proposals or BIPs) was started by Taaki. In 2014, together with Cody Wilson, he launched the Dark Wallet project after a crowdfunding run on IndieGoGo which raised over $50,000. Taaki, along with other developers from Airbitz, Inc. (producers of a bitcoin business directory and mobile bitcoin wallet) created a prototype for a decentralised marketplace called "DarkMarket" in 2014, at a hackathon in Toronto, which was forked into the OpenBazaar project. Activism Taaki has been outspoken in favour of Internet activism such as Anonymous, likening them to modern day freedom-fighters. A long-time contributor to free software, he advocates total data freedom. Taaki has labelled censorship policies as being a wedge towards ever-increasing censorship. He proposes a shift away from specialist thinking towards a creative society of generalist knowledge workers. Taaki is a speaker of Esperanto, which he promotes as an auxiliary country-neutral international language to preserve local languages. He writes that Esperanto serves to break down barriers and help the flow of media across cultural boundaries.n-1.cc Esperanto page Amir Taaki formerly lived in an anarchist squat in Barcelona, Spain. As of 2013, he resided in an anarchist squat in the former anti-G8 HQ building in London, England. Rojava In 2015, Taaki went to Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) to offer his skills to the revolution, and served the YPG military. He had no training, but spent three and a half months in the YPG military fighting on the front. He was then discharged and worked in the civil society for over a year on various projects for Rojava's economics committee. Catalonia In February 2018, Taaki created a group in Catalonia dedicated to leveraging blockchain technology to help national liberation causes such as the Catalan independence movement. References Further reading * External links * Personal website * Interview with "Gavin Andresen and Amir Taaki, Bitcoin,", This Week in Startups, video on YouTube * Bitcoin: the fastest growing currency in the world – video, The Guardian Category:1988 births Category:People from London Category:Living people Category:English computer programmers Category:English people of Iranian descent Category:British Esperantists Category:People associated with Bitcoin Category:Free software people Category:Iranian people of English descent Category:Iranian people of Scottish descent